‘Dead Lover’: Rotterdam Review

Dir. Grace Glowicki. Canada. 2025. 86mins

With its blend of lurid camp and twisted romanticism, its embrace of gleefully lo-fi special effects and a twangy electro-retro score, Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a singular spin on the Frankenstein story, sets its sights firmly on cult status. Glowicki, who co-wrote the screenplay and co-produced the picture, stars as a lonely Gravedigger whose dreams of romance are stymied by the fact that she stinks of corpses. A brief glimpse of happiness with a foppish Lover (Ben Petrie) is abruptly curtailed when he drowns at sea. But Gravedigger is convinced that love will conquer all – even though all that remains of her fiance is his ring finger.

Sets its sights firmly on cult status

This is the kind of comedy horror that embraces silliness over scares, although it does boast some visceral, squelchy gore and practical effects. It remains to be seen whether there’s enough here to generate the kind of underground break-out success of something like Hundreds Of Beavers, but if the film has a future following its premiere at Sundance and screening at Rotterdam, it will be in front of well-lubricated audiences at Midnight slots at further festivals and in rep cinemas.

This is the second directorial venture for Glowicki, whose feature debut, Tito, premiered at SXSW in 2019. She was previously awarded a jury prize at Sundance for her performance in the 2016 short film Her Friend Adam, which was written and directed by her regular collaborator Ben Petrie. Petrie co-wrote Dead Lover and appears in several roles, most notably as the Gravedigger’s ill-fated Lover, and his disembodied finger.

Like much in the picture, Glowicki’s performance as Gravedigger veers towards the cartoonish. Armed with a spade and a geographically unmoored accent (is she meant to be British? Australian?), Gravedigger is a social pariah – an outcast who is the subject of scurrilous gossip courtesy of a Greek chorus of catty neighbours (Petrie, Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow, in three of their multiple supporting roles). Her grief at the loss of her lover prompts her to take desperate action: she plants his finger in a flower-pot and experiments with potions made out of mashed lizards in the hope of growing him back again.

She is only partially successful: the finger grows to around four feet in length and becomes sentient. Realising the short-comings of an attenuated digit as a relationship partner, Gravedigger decides to attach the finger to a body, and settles on that of her Lover’s dead sister, a celebrated opera singer (Doz). Unfortunately, the reanimated Opera Singer is more interested in embarking on an erotically charged murder spree than domestic bliss with the Gravedigger. Plus there’s the problem of the Opera Singer’s grieving widower (Morrow), who feels compelled to defend the honour of his undead wife.

There is a theatrical quality to the film’s staging: Glowicki shot on 16mm film, entirely on a soundstage. Characters are spotlit in vivid colours, while much of the backdrop is shrouded in darkness – a decision which gives the production the appearance of an anarchic cabaret show. Glowicki opts for a look that embraces artificiality – the Gravedigger’s flaxen wig is obviously and unapologetically nylon, the make up is extravagantly vaudevillian. There’s a perverse kinship with the work of John Waters, something that is acknowledged with a nod to the notorious Pink Flamingos dog faeces scene (“I want to pick up a piece of your poo, and eat it like a banana,” says Lover to Gravedigger. Naturally, she is smitten.).

Cartoon sound effects and crude special effects are employed throughout as a reminder, if one were needed, that this is a film that can barely take itself less seriously.